JFK (14 page)

When Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for his new nation on September 2, 1945, he read the following lines from that document: “A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.”

After his long struggle on the side of the United States and the Chinese against the Japanese, and with concrete evidence of U.S. support in the form of a vast shipment of arms, Ho Chi Minh had good reason to believe that his days of fighting to end French domination of his country were coming to a close.

The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so he thought. Meanwhile, in the streets of Hanoi, agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), continued to work with the Vietminh, who had rapidly taken control of North Vietnam when the Japanese war effort had collapsed.

Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho’s brilliant military commander, while serving as minister of the interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Vietminh. That, too, was in September 1945.

The manipulative strings of the power elite had not yet been pulled. The political roles had not yet been changed. It would take a few years of skillful propaganda to prepare the world for the new scenario. Time would pass before the power elite could create a new enemy—the Soviets and communism; and new friends—the former Fascists, Germany, Italy, and Japan, who were now to be known as friendly “anti-Communists. ”

On September 2, 1953, exactly eight years after World War II formally ended, President Dwight Eisenhower’s new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, delivered a major address before an American Legion convention in St. Louis. Although most of Dulles’s remarks focused upon the final stages of the Korean War, which had ground to a frustrating stalemate, he included a most significant statement with regard to communism and Indochina. Dulles said:

In this remarkable statement, the “eight years” that Dulles cited on September 2, 1953, coincides precisely, to the day, with that date of September 2, 1945, when the surrender documents were signed in Tokyo Bay, when the ships sailed from Okinawa bound with an enormous supply of arms for Korea and Vietnam, and when the Declaration of Independence of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam was signed by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, with American officials by his side. That could hardly have been a coincidence. World events are planned.

It was also almost eight years to the day when the first American casualty—Maj. A. Peter Dewey of the OSS—occurred in Vietnam. He was killed in a skirmish on the outskirts of Saigon on September 26, 1945.

John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, recognized that September 2, 1945, was officially the date of the start of that “desperate struggle” in Indochina—later to become known as the Vietnam War. More importantly, during those eight years, the anti-Communist climate had been tuned to a hysterical pitch, both at home and abroad. South Korea had been invaded by “Communist” forces from the north, and through an intimate new medium known as television, moving pictures of an ongoing war were brought into the homes of millions of Americans for the first time. Families also watched while Sen. Joseph McCarthy detailed the internal threat of communism in government and industry. The public viewed the scenario directly, and as the power elite wanted it to: The Soviet Communists were the “enemy” all over the world. Ho Chi Minh and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were no longer our friends. They, too, were now part of the “Communist” enemy.

Thus, although Secretary of State Dulles confirmed that the superpowers had been involved in a great invisible war and that it actually had begun on the same day that World War II ended, no one seemed to notice. Today it might be more accurate to say that the world war did not end, but that only the sides changed, and that the majority of the victims of that new type of warfare were the noncombatants of the Third World.

That new invisible war, based on East-West alignments, was, more than ever before, dependent upon the justification provided by a propaganda line that stretched all the way back to the early nineteenth century, to the genocidal theories of Malthus and Darwin.

As stated earlier, the Center for Defense Information had revealed in 1985 that “over the preceding years there had been 130 wars of varying intensity, including forty-one that were still active at that time in which no than 16 million people had died. This is a gross number that could match the casualty figures of almost any other period in history. For those who agree with Malthus, such enormous losses are to be expected; for those who agree with Darwin, those who survive are by definition the fittest.

The chain of events in Indochina from 1945 to 1965 that had led to the intervention of regular U.S. military forces there reveals the methods employed by the invisible services to produce this scale of global warfare and destruction. During the years 1945-53, the eight years alluded to by Secretary of State Dulles, the web was being drawn, and new alliances were being craftily woven. Friends became enemies; former enemies became allies. Whole new governments were formed to provide the political linkages essential to the requirements of the new bipolar structure of the world.

In many cases, the United States or the Soviet Union armed both sides of a conflict at different times. Dulles admitted in his St. Louis speech that the United States had been contributing to both sides of the newest “desperate struggle,” that is, “to the combined efforts of the French and of Vietnam”—a rare admission, and true. As major manufacturers of military supplies and equipment, it mattered not at all to the great industrial combines of the United States who bought their products. War was the best business in town.

Around 1960, the CIA made arrangements to have Soviet tank parts manufactured in the United States and delivered to the Egyptian army, which was equipped with Soviet-built tanks, in an attempt to prove that the United States was a more reliable friend and supplier to the Egyptians than their ally Russia. In this instance, as in many others, the CIA was living up to the name given to it by R. Buckminster Fuller: “The Capitalist Welfare Department.” Of course, this is what perpetual warfare is all about. One of the fundamental purposes of the Cold War has been to escalate arms production and sales on a global basis. This promotion is one of the things that the CIA does best.

(Because the early history of the Cold War and in particular of events in Indochina during the years 1945-65 is so fragmented, unclear, and unconventional, I am beginning here to enter the period of the withdrawal from Vietnam of the Japanese, the British, the Chinese, and the French, the creation and dissolution of Vietnamese governments, unconventional military activities, and a power elite tapestry that is intricate and complicated. During all of these years, it was the American presence and influence that continued. On the next several pages, I introduce several subjects that I know need more elaboration. I am setting the stage and urge you to read on to these answers and explanations as they enter the pages of history in a more lucid form.)

Since the OSS had been active in Indochina since World War II, it did not take long for its successor, the CIA, to begin to influence the flow of military equipment into that part of the world. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition.

But on September 23, 1945, shortly after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces that had arrived in Saigon from their sweep through Burma in the last days of World War II and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’état and seized control of the administration of Saigon.

They installed the French government there once again. This move returned the Cochin—the southern sector of Vietnam—to French domination, although it had been agreed at the Potsdam Conference
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that the British army was to have administrative control of the area. Now there were two governments in South Vietnam, with the British army remaining outside the flow of events and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north.

Based on the record of those years, the Vietminh hoped for American assistance or mediation in attaining their independence from the French. French entrenchment in Vietnam was not limited to its military. Vietnam was an old French colony. A number of French families had been born and raised there, as their parents had been. There were major French business interests there, such as the great Michelin rubber industry. The French banks in Indochina were among the most powerful in Asia. It was one thing to remove the French army; it was an entirely different matter to remove French interests. This is what the Vietminh wanted. They got neither.

The American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, in May 21, 1944, said, “It should be the duty of nations having political ties with such people [as the Indochinese] . . . to help aspiring peoples to prepare themselves for the duties and responsibilities of self-government, and to attain liberty.”

On October 25, 1945, a senior Department of State official, John Carter Vincent, stated, “This [the Hull policy] continues to be American policy.” His speech confirmed the earlier agreement and gave credence to Vietminh expectations. But this faith in the system proved to be fruitless.

All remaining Japanese forces had been rounded up and had surrendered to the British military command in Saigon by November 30, 1945. By January 1, 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam. Then, on January 28, 1946, command of all French forces in Vietnam passed from the British to Gen. Jean Leclerc of France. Thus began another phase of U.S. military aid in Indochina, this time to the French. Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris in midyear, but the conference failed due to French intransigence. He continued his own efforts at negotiations until September, without obtaining the agreement he sought.

Fighting broke out between the French and the Vietminh in late November 1946, and by the end of the year guerrilla warfare had spread all over Vietnam. All hope for settlement of this French/Vietminh dispute evaporated in 1947, and by the end of 1949 the war had become a major international issue.

This is the way it was. There can be no clearer picture of events of that time. We do not have precise answers as to why we gave U.S.arms to Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and then a few years later provided Ho’s enemy, the French, with $3 billion of our arms. The situation is not supposed to be clear. The plan made before the end of World War II was to make war in Indochina, and this was the way it was done. From 1945 to 1975, there was warfare of one kind or another.

Behind the scenes, the French, with U.S. acquiescence, were forming an anti-Communist national puppet government under the leadership of the former emperor, Bao Dai. As a result, by the end of 1949, there were three aspiring governments in Vietnam: the French colonial administration, Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

As early as 1947, the “anti-Communist” national elements of government included Ngo Dinh Diem, the man whom the United States would make president in 1954. But in 1948, Diem refused to support a French proposal for a “provisional central government.” This three-way structure was quite essential to the long-range plan for the invisible war. The French had already decided that they had to get out of Vietnam. They were becoming seriously involved in Algeria, much closer to home, and their own internal political problems were severe.

However, if the French had withdrawn before the United States was ready to enter the contest, the only government in Vietnam would have been the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. No one else could have contested the Ho Chi Minh regime. Therefore, the invisible war game required a new government to offset the Democratic Republic. The reluctant Bao Dai inherited the task. As the Soviets put it, this was a new “puppet government formed by the French with the blessings of the Americans.” They were absolutely correct.

By February 1950, both Great Britain and the United States had established diplomatic relations with the new State of Vietnam in the south, even though each relationship was no more than an empty shell. When all these details had been formalized, the situation was ready for development as a war front.

On May 8, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion. One month later, we were at war in Korea, and the war in Vietnam had become another international crisis—in reserve.

These events closed the circle. At no time were things out of control. The same ponderous glacier that had been set in motion on September 2, 1945, when those heavily laden transports left Okinawa for Korea and Vietnam, had never stopped moving. By mid-1950, important military action, short of nuclear force, was under way. What had begun as a realignment of forces and the production of a bipolar world had become a full-fledged “hot war” on the two chosen battlefields, Korea and Vietnam. It is important to note that it was during these two wars that the CIA developed from a fledgling “intelligence” agency into its true form as master of American clandestine services. It had expanded enormously and matured.